Tigmafuzz
02-07-2012, 10:17 AM
Charles Dickens (https://www.google.com/search?q=dickens&tbm=bks&tbs=bkv:r&biw=1440&bih=781) would be 200 if he were still alive today. Let us all take a moment to reflect on what that means.
Somebody would have to be checking his life monitor every five seconds because people just aren't supposed to live to be 200. Someone would be feeding him through a tube, have him hooked up to machines that breathe for him, there would have to be someone with a schedule telling them when to come in and remove his waste and clean him, and he probably wouldn't even be conscious. He wouldn't still be writing novels, nor would his existence be relevant (other than for scientists to study him and figure why he WON'T JUST DIE) and he would be a burden on whoever had to take care of him.
Now, I have nothing against Dickens. He was a great writer. Probably the greatest of the Victorian era. Hell, none of his books have ever gone out of print. His three (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Twist) most (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Copperfield) popular (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Two_Cities) books are among my top twenty good reads for people of all ages. But there's something about him I just can't grasp.
This is a pretty great (albeit brief) article about the man's life. (http://www.online-literature.com/dickens/) Something I never understood is why most of my closest friends have such an unnatural attraction to the man. A lot of my friends are avid readers, and the ones whose opinions I normally hold in a slightly higher respect than other people have a strange inclination to compare C.D.'s works to almost everything else they read. Why?
Some people just compare every work of fiction they've ever read to something written by Dickens. As much as their comparisons pan out, as much as they make sense, as much as I can understand why they compare whatever they're currently reading to the literary elements in something much grander, it just annoys me so much that they compare every single thing to the same few books over and over again. Nobody compares every philosophy book to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nobody compares every psychology paper they read to Freud and Maslow. Nobody compares electrolysis to the making of AA batteries. Nobody compares gravity and String Theory objectively. So why compare A Tale of Two Cities to, say, Moby Dick or The Brothers Karamazov? They handle completely different themes.
And as much as it pains me to say it, I do the same thing sometimes. Not comparing every book to Charles Dickens, but comparing certain things that are only marginally related to what the topic is. Usually it only happens in real conversation, probably as a result of my social anxiety causing me to talk about something I'm positively right about as a clutch, rather than risk putting myself in a compromising position to talk about something I'm not 100% sure of or that I haven't studied to a level of personal satisfaction. But I do it nonetheless.
So now to the actual thread topic:
What are some things that you do, that you catch yourself in the middle of doing, that you wish you didn't do? What little things do you do that annoy yourself?
I, for example, when making a thread, find myself ranting about things that have next to nothing to do with the actual topic of that thread. I knew what I wanted the topic of the thread to be. But I just had to visit Google and see the custom doodle. And here we are.
Somebody would have to be checking his life monitor every five seconds because people just aren't supposed to live to be 200. Someone would be feeding him through a tube, have him hooked up to machines that breathe for him, there would have to be someone with a schedule telling them when to come in and remove his waste and clean him, and he probably wouldn't even be conscious. He wouldn't still be writing novels, nor would his existence be relevant (other than for scientists to study him and figure why he WON'T JUST DIE) and he would be a burden on whoever had to take care of him.
Now, I have nothing against Dickens. He was a great writer. Probably the greatest of the Victorian era. Hell, none of his books have ever gone out of print. His three (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Twist) most (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Copperfield) popular (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Two_Cities) books are among my top twenty good reads for people of all ages. But there's something about him I just can't grasp.
This is a pretty great (albeit brief) article about the man's life. (http://www.online-literature.com/dickens/) Something I never understood is why most of my closest friends have such an unnatural attraction to the man. A lot of my friends are avid readers, and the ones whose opinions I normally hold in a slightly higher respect than other people have a strange inclination to compare C.D.'s works to almost everything else they read. Why?
Some people just compare every work of fiction they've ever read to something written by Dickens. As much as their comparisons pan out, as much as they make sense, as much as I can understand why they compare whatever they're currently reading to the literary elements in something much grander, it just annoys me so much that they compare every single thing to the same few books over and over again. Nobody compares every philosophy book to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nobody compares every psychology paper they read to Freud and Maslow. Nobody compares electrolysis to the making of AA batteries. Nobody compares gravity and String Theory objectively. So why compare A Tale of Two Cities to, say, Moby Dick or The Brothers Karamazov? They handle completely different themes.
And as much as it pains me to say it, I do the same thing sometimes. Not comparing every book to Charles Dickens, but comparing certain things that are only marginally related to what the topic is. Usually it only happens in real conversation, probably as a result of my social anxiety causing me to talk about something I'm positively right about as a clutch, rather than risk putting myself in a compromising position to talk about something I'm not 100% sure of or that I haven't studied to a level of personal satisfaction. But I do it nonetheless.
So now to the actual thread topic:
What are some things that you do, that you catch yourself in the middle of doing, that you wish you didn't do? What little things do you do that annoy yourself?
I, for example, when making a thread, find myself ranting about things that have next to nothing to do with the actual topic of that thread. I knew what I wanted the topic of the thread to be. But I just had to visit Google and see the custom doodle. And here we are.